~ Day by day with RA …

Battle Scars

As I was drying off from my morning shower, I noticed how battle-scarred my poor left knee is. Like some bedraggled tom cat with scraggly whiskers and torn ears, my knee has had its share of scrapes.

Right below my knee is about a 2″ scar from when I fell on the sharp edge of a coffee can when I was about 4 years old. Right in the middle of the knee, in that soft spot just below the knee cap, is a pock-marked looking scar about 1/2″ in diameter from when I fell and imbedded some large pieces of gravel in my knee when I was about 8. (Took forever for that to heal.) Finally, wrapping from one side of the front of my knee all the way to the other is a slender scar from when I laid my knee open climbing through a barbed-wire fence as a teenager.

There aren’t, however, any scars from surgery (yet). I’ve had my left elbow, both shoulders, right hip, and various other parts (such as tonsils and gall bladder) worked on, but up to this point, my knees have escaped the scalpel.

I can’t say that I’m looking forward to the surgery, but I am ready for my knee to be better. For some reason, once I decide on surgery to solve an issue, that issue seems to escalate. For example, once I decided to have shoulder replacement, it seemed that my shoulder hurt much worse and more frequently than before I made the decision. The same with my knee. Since I scheduled the surgery, it’s been giving me fits. I guess it’s decided that if I’m going to have it worked on, it’s going to give me good reason.

I guess the good news is that these new battle scars will be small. If they’re anything like the scope scars I have from rotator cuff surgery, I won’t even be able to find them after a few weeks. And with all the other battle scars around, they’ll have a lot of competition to be noticeable.